code poetry

Along with the growth of executable code poetry, code poets are writing poems that draw on the aesthetic, formal, and visual dimensions of computer code without focusing on the executability of the code itself. The work of Mez Breeze, is one such example. Breeze is an Australian net.artist who uses the internet as a primary medium for her work. Her digital multimedia work combines sound, image, text, and code, and her writing includes electronic literature and code poems.

In recent years, growing interest has emerged in the relationship between poetry and computer code. A higher brow version of ASCII art, code poems draw on programming languages like Java or C++ for their formal inspiration. Since 2013, Stanford University has been running code poetry slams to explore the poetic potential of code. Participants in these competitions have explored the broadest definitions of code poetry.

A review of 'lo terciario/the tertiary'

The Spanish and English texts are rotated 180° relative to one another, such that the bilingual reader, halfway in, would rotate the book upside down to read the collection in its entirety. Or — if you are an anglophone reader, like myself — you are made literally aware that you are reading only one half of the book.

So begins “todas sus propiedades sensibles se han esfumado,” the opening poem of lo terciario/the tertiary, the newest collection released in May by Puerto Rican poet and translator Raquel Salas Rivera. Or it begins:

Rachel Zolf, 'Human Resources'

Jeff T. Johnson, Whitney Trettien, and Amy Paeth joined Al Filreis to discuss a passage from Rachel Zolf's Human Resources. The book was published by Coach House Books in Toronto in 2007. Our passages can be found on pages 73 through 79. All but one of these sections have been performed by Zolf at various readings, and these can be found and heard at her PennSound page. One of the sections had never been recorded, so the poet obliged us by making a new recording for our discussion — and this too has been added now to her PennSound page.